Hello Dave,

I am sorry but unfortunately this isn't possible currently and I personally don't think it makes sense to show "newest first" because firstly, conversations are not "e-mails" per-se but it's pretty similar to instant messages / sms conversations. It wouldn't make sense if your instant messages are displaying latest messages at the top and having the textarea appear before the conversation.

Hi Mark.
So if you have an ongoing conversation with a friend online (because you live in different time-zones, and he messages you when you're snuggly tucked up in bed), and it's a conversation that's been ongoing for months, you don't think it's a bit of a hassle to scroll, scroll, scroll down the page when you click on the icon that says you've got a new reply? As a user, I'm not interested in reading all my old stuff, I just want to see what he's replied to my last message.
I didn't mean put the text entry box before the conversation, just if they are organised with newest first, put the reply box under that newest entry. I appreciate it's not an email system, I was just drawing a parallel to how people read messages naturally.
Perhaps as a mid-way point then would be to automatically scroll down the page to the last message received. That way the user is taken to the point in the conversation which really matters - the answer.
Failing that, maybe some way to collapse the conversation to show just the latest reply.
Or, even better, give the user a choice on how they want to see the messages - ascending or descending order?
I'm just giving you feedback from my own user's experience.

Hello Dave,

Perhaps in the future, messages that are older than x amount of weeks should be hidden automatically and could then be shown again with a "Load older messages" button at the top. We'll see what we could do about this